A blood test for autism? A drug to reverse it??

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A new discovery raises hope that autism may be more easily diagnosed and that its effects may be more reversible than previously thought. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, scientists have identified a way to detect the disorder using blood and have discovered that drugs which affect the methylation state (“DNA tagging”) of genes could reverse autism’s effects. This type of drug is already being used in some cancer treatments.

Valerie W. Hu, Ph.D., one of the researchers involved in the work from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at The George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. is the mother of a 22 year old son with autism.

To make their discovery, Hu and colleagues identified chemical changes in DNA taken from cells of identical twins and sibling pairs, in which only one of the twins or siblings was diagnosed with autism.

The researchers then compared genes that showed changes in DNA tagging (methylation) with a list of genes that showed different levels of expression from these same individuals.

Then the scientists studied the amount of protein product produced by two genes that appear on both lists in autistic and control regions of the cerebellum and frontal cortex of the brain.

They found that both proteins, as predicted by the observed increase in DNA tagging, were reduced in the autistic brain. This suggests that blocking the chemical tagging of these genes may reverse symptoms of the disorder and demonstrates the feasibility of using more easily accessible cells from blood (or other non-brain tissues) for diagnostic screening.

Since I am NOT the scientist in the family, I am not able to decipher this study in layman’s terms with out butchering it.But wouldn’t it be great if newborns could take a blood test (similar to the PKU test) and then be given a drug to reverse autism if it is present?

I like this kind of research.

“For far too long, autism research has been side-tracked by the cranky notion that it’s caused by the MMR vaccine,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Studies like this, which define genetic and epigenetic changes in discrete subgroups of the autism spectrum, offer real hope that effective treatments and accurate diagnosis are closer at hand.”